Cassette Beasts is a Pokemon Fusion style RPG from former Chucklefish devs

You probably know Pokemon Fusion—the website where you can combine two Pokemon to create a brand new Frankenstein's Pokemon monster. Take a pinch of Pikachu and a dash of Diglett and you get Pikalett, a yellow, earless subterranean electricity monster. Adorable!

Enter Cassette Beasts, an open-world monster battler RPG that appears to be heavily inspired by Pokemon Fusion. In Cassette Beasts you explore the island of New Wirral, encountering monsters, battling them, and recording them on 1980s-style audio cassettes. The trailer, which is quite delightful, can be watched above.

You can see that instead of sending your collection of monsters into turn-based battle while you steer from the sidelines, in Cassette Beasts you actually transform into a monster during combat. And, you can combine your monster form with your NPC companion's to create a new, more powerful creature with Cassette Beasts' monster fusion system.

Cassette Beasts is being developed by Bytten Studio, staffed with former devs from Chucklefish who worked on Stardew Valley and Starbound. The official site already has lots of info about attack types (which include fire, plant, water, poison, and even plastic) and the monsters themselves like the Dandylion, the Masquerattle, and the sure to be fan-favorite Pombomb, an adorable bomb-chucking happy-faced Pomeranian. Cute and deadly.

There's already a fusion demo you can play around with, where you mix the DNA of two Cassette Beasts to generate a third.

(Image credit: Bytten Studio)

We don't know when Cassette Beasts will be released—Bytten Studio is currently looking for funding and a publishing partner, though we hope the 'coming soon' on its Steam Store page is accurate.

Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring stories in RPGs so he can make up his own.